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One of the most persistent challenges in the study of regional politics in Italy is the lack of systematized data and information about the composition of regional legislatures and governments and the profiles of elected officials. In this paper, we describe the ITREGPARL dataset, a new comprehensive dataset of Italian regional politics comprising 6077 regional politicians from 1993 to 2020. It includes information about regional councillors, regional ministers, presidents and vice-presidents of the regional council, regional presidents and vice-presidents. Along with socio-demographic characteristics – gender, age, previous profession, education – it includes data such as experience and incumbency, number of mandates, length of service and partisanship. It also includes region-level variables, such as geographical area, type of gender quotas and the regional authority index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender quotas are generally regarded as the foremost measure for the promotion of gender equality in politics. While quotas and their impact vary across countries, a strong quota system is defined as including blocked electoral lists, large district magnitude, strong non-compliance sanctions, and rank-order rules like gender alternation in the candidate lists. Yet, also in the presence of strong quota rules, parties might attempt strategies aimed at mitigating their gender-balancing effect. By taking Italy as a case study, in this article we investigate whether and how parties competing in the 2018 elections were able to adapt their gender gatekeeping strategy to the new quota law. Our finding suggests that Italian parties relied on another characteristic of the electoral system—namely, the possibility of multiple candidacies—to successfully hinder women candidates' chances of election. Accordingly, we highlight that a wider set of electoral system characteristics should be taken into account in the design of a (strong) quota law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Parliament (EP) is an intriguing arena to study the nexus between gender, speech-making, and leadership performance, as it simultaneously challenges and confirms gender-based hierarchies in legislative contexts. While the EP has a higher level of women's representation than national parliaments, women's access to top-level positions nonetheless remains limited. Yet the EP is a special case of a legislature. Lacking a right of initiative, it often acts collectively as an inter-institutional opposition to the other EU core institutions. In this article, through a software-assisted analysis of EP debates following the president's State of the Union Address, we investigate party group leaders' evaluations of the Commission's proposals and their charismatic rhetoric from a gender angle. Focusing on the three most recent legislatures (2009-2021), our analysis shows that while collective inter-institutional opposition is present in the EP, women leaders generally show higher levels of rhetorical skillfulness and voice either approval or opposition toward the Commission more emphatically than their male counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the study of the European Commission's (EC) politicization by examining this phenomenon from the angle of communication. We elaborate a novel approach based on two linguistic indicators – charisma and technicality – which we then apply through a content analysis of 8,947 speeches delivered by Commission members between 1999 and 2019. Contrary to the narrative of an ever more political Commission, we find that the linguistic politicization of the EC decreased over the period under exam, reaching its nadir during Jean‐Claude Juncker's presidential term (2014–19). Our findings raise the question of whether language is yet another ordinary dimension of politicization, or rather it is used strategically by the Commission to underplay its underlying politicization as measured in more traditional institutional, policy, and individual terms. Either way, our study highlights the multi‐faceted nature of the politicization concept, and the need for deeper and more nuanced analyses of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an original analysis of the social policy discourse at the European Union level by focusing on the language used by European Commission Presidents when addressing social issues. Through an empirical analysis based on a semi-supervised machine learning approach, we consider the entire corpus of speeches made by Barroso and Juncker from 2010 to 2018 and we classify all sentences according to three possible variants of social policy language: social-retrenchment, social-investment and rights-based language. We argue that the focus on these languages allows us to understand whether the 'fiscal consolidation discipline' narrative, which dominated in the aftermath of the Great Recession, has been challenged over the years by the recourse to alternative 'social policy images'. The results confirm a significant shift in the overall configuration of social policy discourse between Barroso and Juncker. This shift has been mainly characterized by an increase in the use of rights-based language and a decrease in the use of social-retrenchment language, which however has not been completely abandoned. Therefore, the recalibration of EC's speeches on social policy has not been abrupt but has instead been incremental. The article concludes by discussing preliminary interpretations of the observed trends and their potential implications in terms of 'discursive legacy' in the post-pandemic era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little doubt that the European Central Bank (ECB), and in particular its presidency, has taken the lead in tackling the euro crisis. But can this leadership be also characterised as charismatic? This article answers the question by focusing on language – a key component as well as a reliable indicator of charisma. By means of a software‐assisted content analysis of the entire corpus of ECB presidential speeches, it is found that the crisis has indeed led to the emergence of the Bank's presidency as a charismatic euro leader. This in turn confirms the recent politicisation of the ECB, but at the same time might be seen as mitigating the problems related to the Bank's democratic deficit, to the extent that charisma can be seen, from a Weberian standpoint, as an alternative source of political legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we investigate the way in which the two latest Presidents of the Commission have tackled the question of the legitimacy of the EU in the delivery of the State of the Union Addresses (SOTEU). Our analysis, based on a qualitative content analysis of the SOTEU speeches, identifies a marked difference in the discursive legitimation strategies employed by the two Presidents and in the conception of the legitimacy of the EU that they promote. In Barroso's speeches, the legitimazing principle recalls the classical functionalist interpretation of the 'rationality' of the EU decisions mainly in terms of economic outputs, whilst the underlying conception of legitimacy that shapes Juncker's speeches recalls an input-based understanding of legitimacy as democracy and popular sovereignty. By way of conclusion, we argue that the introduction of the Spitzencandidaten system has been instrumental in providing the two Presidents with a different discursive opportunity structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate whether and how political parties function as gatekeepers in determining gender differentiations in committee appointments by using the Italian parliamentary committee system from 1994 to 2013 as a case study. Committee membership provides individual MPs with direct influence in a specific policy area as well as with visibility and expertise, thus affecting MPs' political careers. Accordingly, to study women's appointments to committees' positions is eventually to say something about women's chances to have an actual effect in the political process. After presenting the theoretical framework, three hypotheses are proposed. Our findings show that women tend to be appointed to committees dealing with stereotypically 'feminine' and 'less prestigious' issues, and that leftwing parties reproduce this pattern less than right-wing parties, but not when it comes to the appointment to more prestigious and influential positions. Moreover, we found that no significant longitudinal trends towards more unbiased distributions can be detected. A discussion closes the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the variety of competing interpretations of domination, a common feature of the most influential analyses of the concept is their reliance on a normative criterion: the detrimental effect of domination on those subject to it. This article offers a non-evaluative, non-consequence-based definition of domination, in line with the perspective on power developed by the theory of the social exchange. Domination, it is argued, should be seen as a structural property of a power relation, and consists in an extreme inequality in the social distribution of power. It is contended, accordingly, that the postulation of a society in which domination is avoided (or minimized) should rely on the ideal of the minimization of inequality, and, more specifically, that it should be based on a distributional pattern of maximally equal social resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this work is to offer an assessment of the conceptual relations between 'power' and 'freedom'. The two concepts are normally thought of as standing in a relation of mutual exclusion, and are often defined in reciprocal terms: while being free means not being subject to someone's power, to have power is to constrain someone's freedom. In this article I propose a more detailed interpretation of their conceptual relations, distinguishing between two different cases. In the case in which power and freedom are understood as properties of two different individuals involved in a social relation, I shall argue that they are not necessarily in a relation of mutual exclusion: power can be exercised in ways which do not reduce, and which might even increase, the power-subject's freedom. In the case, by contrast, in which they are understood as properties of the same individual, I shall claim that power and freedom show a significant degree of correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]